Abstract
Historians and political scientists tend to yearn for turning points. The history of the Atlantic Alliance has been no exception in this regard and is one ripe with defining moments. Since the signing of the Washington Treaty on 4 April 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been a principal witness to some of the seminal events of the Cold War, from the Korean War that paved the way for the creation of NATO’s integrated military command structure and the integration of West Germany into the alliance in 1955 to the travails of Suez and Vietnam.1 Its members have had to face the perils of the Berlin blockade and the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s and confront the spectre of nuclear war. A sense of crisis has often accompanied the alliance on its long, and sometimes turbulent, path through its 64 years; on gloomier occasions, such as the French withdrawal in 1966 and the Soviet deployment of SS-20 missiles in 1977, and on more joyful days, as when the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989 and the Soviet Union disintegrated in December 1991, NATO has been no stranger to drama and tension. The end of the Cold War was perhaps the most defining moment of all, creating a sense of significant political discontinuity. In the absence of the Soviet threat that had defined its existence for 40-plus years, NATO’s very being was called into question, and the alliance struggled to articulate a new raison d’être.2
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Notes
See, for example, Veronica M. Kitchen, The Globalization of NATO: Intervention, Security and Identity (London, New York: Routledge, 2010).
NATO’s evolution after the Cold War has attracted significant IR scholarship. For a selection see, for example, John Mearsheimer, ‘The False Promise of International Institutions’, International Security, Vol. 19(3), pp. 5–49, 1994–1995;
John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Back to the Future: Instability After the Cold War’, International Security, Vol. 15 (1), 1990, pp. 5–56 (1990);
Robert O. Keohane, Joseph S. Nye, and Stanley Hoffmann, After the Cold War: International Institutions and State Strategies in Europe, 1989–1991 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993);
John M. Owen, ‘How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace’, International Security, Vol. 19, 1994;
Bruce M. Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993);
Frank Schimmelpfennig, The EU, NATO and the Integration of Europe: Rules and Rhetorik (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Cited in I.H. Daalder, NATO in the 21st Century: What Purpose, What Missions? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1999), p. 6.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 175.
Alan Bryman, Edward Bell, and James, T. Teevan. Social Research Methods (Don Mills, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 371.
Barry Barns, T.S. Kuhn and Social Science (London and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982), p. 17.
One of those thinkers was Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York and Toronto: Free Press, Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1992).
John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
See, for example, Wesley K. Clark, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat, 1st edition (New York: Public Affairs, 2001).
Ivo H. Daalder, Getting to Dayton: The Making of America’s Bosnia Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), p. 34.
See Sean Kay, NATO and the Future of European Security (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), pp. 103–105.
See, for example, Atlantic Council of the United States, Transatlantic Transformation: Building a NATO-EU Security Architecture, Policy Paper (Washington, DC: Atlantic Council of the United States, 2006);
European Union, Institute for Security Studies, ed. What do Europeans Want from NATO?, vol. 8 (Paris: European Union Institute for Security Studies, 2010);
Jolyon Howorth and John Keeler, eds., Defending Europe: The EU, NATO and the Quest for European Autonomy (New York: Palgrave, 2003);
Sten Rynning, ‘Why Not NATO? Military Planning in the European Union’, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 26 (1), 2003, pp. 53–54.
See Sarwar Kashmeri, NATO 2.0: Reboot or Delete? (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2011), p. 55.
Benjamin Schreer and Timo Noetzel, ‘Does a Multi-tier NATO Matter? The Atlantic Alliance and the Process of Strategic Change’, International Affairs, Vol. 85 (2), 2009, pp. 211–226.
James Gow, Defending the West (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005);
Georg Sorensen, ‘The Case for Combining Material Forces and Ideas in the Study of IR’, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 14 (5), 2008, 5–32.
John J. Mearsheimer, ‘The False Promise of International Institutions’, International Security, Vol. 19(4), 1994/1995, pp. 5–49.
Robert B. McCalla, ‘NATO’s Persistence after the Cold War’, International Organization, Vol. 50(3), (Summer 1996), p. 451.
Gunther Hellmann and Reinhard Wolf, ‘Neorealism, Neoliberal Institutionalism, and the Future of NATO’, Security Studies, Vol. 3 (3), 1993, p. 19.
Merje Kuus, ‘“Love, Peace and NATO”: Imperial Subject-Making in Central Europe’, Antipode, Vol. 39 (2), 2007, p. 273.
Frank Schimmelfennig, ‘NATO Enlargement: A Constructivist Explanation’, Security Studies, Vol. 8 (2/3), 1999, p. 211.
Quoted in Helene Sjursen, ‘On the identity of NATO’, International Affairs, Vol. 80 (4), 2004, p. 689;
see also Thomas Risse-Kappen, ‘Collective Identity in a Democratic Community: The Case of NATO’, in Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 357–399.
On social-constructivist accounts of NATO-Russia relations see M.J. Williams and I. Neumann (1999), pp. 357–387; Jeff Huysmans, ‘Shape-shifting NATO: Humanitarian Action and the Kosovo Refugee Crisis’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 28, 2002, pp. 599–618;
E. Adler, ‘The Spread of Security Communities: Communities of Practice, Self-Restraint, and NATO’s Post — Cold War Transformation’, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 14 (2), 2008, pp. 195–230.
Adler, ‘Spread of Security Communities’, pp. 208–220. See also Vincent Pouliot (2008), “The Logic of Practicality: A Theory of Practice of Security Communities,” International Organization 62 (2): 257–288.
Vincent Pouliot, International Security in Practice: The Politics of NATO-Russia Diplomacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
The concept of cognitive authority, which developed from social epistemology, was defined by Wilson as the authority to influence thoughts that human beings would consider proper. Patrick Wilson, Second-Hand Knowledge: An Inquiry into Cognitive Authority (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983), p. 15.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘Who Needs NATO?’, The New York Times, 15 June 2011.
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© 2013 Ellen Hallams, Luca Ratti and Benjamin Zyla
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Hallams, E., Ratti, L., Zyla, B. (2013). Introduction — A New Paradigm for NATO?. In: Hallams, E., Ratti, L., Zyla, B. (eds) NATO beyond 9/11. New Security Challenges. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230391222_1
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